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authorPaul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>2007-10-16 01:27:43 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@woody.linux-foundation.org>2007-10-16 09:43:09 -0700
commit607717a65d92858fd925bec05baae4d142719f27 (patch)
treeb7faea733fe3426881e63bc7549db9c97c8bdf59 /COPYING
parent2ed6dc34f9ed39bb8e4c81ea1056f0ba56315841 (diff)
cpuset: remove sched domain hooks from cpusets
Remove the cpuset hooks that defined sched domains depending on the setting of the 'cpu_exclusive' flag. The cpu_exclusive flag can only be set on a child if it is set on the parent. This made that flag painfully unsuitable for use as a flag defining a partitioning of a system. It was entirely unobvious to a cpuset user what partitioning of sched domains they would be causing when they set that one cpu_exclusive bit on one cpuset, because it depended on what CPUs were in the remainder of that cpusets siblings and child cpusets, after subtracting out other cpu_exclusive cpusets. Furthermore, there was no way on production systems to query the result. Using the cpu_exclusive flag for this was simply wrong from the get go. Fortunately, it was sufficiently borked that so far as I know, almost no successful use has been made of this. One real time group did use it to affectively isolate CPUs from any load balancing efforts. They are willing to adapt to alternative mechanisms for this, such as someway to manipulate the list of isolated CPUs on a running system. They can do without this present cpu_exclusive based mechanism while we develop an alternative. There is a real risk, to the best of my understanding, of users accidentally setting up a partitioned scheduler domains, inhibiting desired load balancing across all their CPUs, due to the nonobvious (from the cpuset perspective) side affects of the cpu_exclusive flag. Furthermore, since there was no way on a running system to see what one was doing with sched domains, this change will be invisible to any using code. Unless they have real insight to the scheduler load balancing choices, they will be unable to detect that this change has been made in the kernel's behaviour. Initial discussion on lkml of this patch has generated much comment. My (probably controversial) take on that discussion is that it has reached a rough concensus that the current cpuset cpu_exclusive mechanism for defining sched domains is borked. There is no concensus on the replacement. But since we can remove this mechanism, and since its continued presence risks causing unwanted partitioning of the schedulers load balancing, we should remove it while we can, as we proceed to work the replacement scheduler domain mechanisms. Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com> Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com> Cc: Dinakar Guniguntala <dino@in.ibm.com> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'COPYING')
0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions